Or, perhaps, the crisis in your history was your attendance on a "mission." You had lived in neglect of religion, almost complete. Confession was a bugbear to you. Years of sin and forgetfulness of God had hardened your conscience. But suddenly all was changed. You seemed a new man. Your faith was illuminated with a new brilliancy. Sin had a new horror. The string of your tongue was loosed, and oh, with what ease, with what fidelity and exactness, you made that dreaded confession! What comfort you derived from it! and with what energy and determination did you enter on the duties of a Christian life! Or, it might have been in less striking ways that grace did its work. It may have been a book, a word, an interior inspiration, some of the seasons of the holy Church, holy communion, some of the lesser changes of life, a fit of sickness, a violent temptation: these may have been the instruments which God made use of, from time to time, to convey special graces to your soul. Sometimes the aim of these graces was to arouse you out of some deeply-seated habit of sin; sometimes to draw your heart away from the world to heaven; sometimes it was a call to prayer; sometimes a warning of danger: in fine, for some purpose bearing on your salvation, there they are, those visits of grace in your past life, as distinct and unmistakable as any other part of your history. When we read the Bible story of such saints as Abraham, Moses, and Elias, what strikes us as most wonderful and most beautiful is the familiarity in which they lived with God, how God drew near to them and spoke to them. {343} Now, such passages have a parallel in the history of each one of us. There are times in our lives, and not a few such times, when God draws near to the soul, when He confronts it, makes special demands upon it, addresses it no longer in general, but particularly and individually; when He says to the soul, Go and do this, Do not do that, as unmistakably as when He said to Abraham: "_Go forth out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and out of thy father's house, and come into the land which I shall show thee_." [Footnote 83] [Footnote 83: Gen. xii. 1.] And if this be so, the mode in which we receive these divine communications must have a great deal to do with our guilt or innocence before God. We read in the Book of Judges, that on a certain occasion an angel of the Lord appeared to Manne and his wife, with a message from on high. He appeared to them in a human shape, and spoke with a human voice, and they did not know that he was an angel. It was not until they saw him ascend to heaven in the flame from the altar that they understood that they had been talking with one of the heavenly host. Then they said: "_We shall certainly die because we have seen God!_" [Footnote 84] [Footnote 84: Judges xiii. 22.]